Sorry about the blown out photo, the batteries on the flash attachment died suddenly and I had to use the built-in flash, which as a general rule should never, ever be used.

Today’s flashback image is actually from the end of January last year since the 1st of Feb consisted of mouth close-ups showing his very first tooth (or two). Considering he has at least sixteen teeth now that’s a lot of progress (and tooth moving) in one year!

Yesterday was dog-pile on dad day. I wasn’t feeling very good but managed to get outside for a little bit with Z and do some grocery shopping before coming home to collapse (of course he was right there to collapse on me). I let him push the cart at the grocery store and when we came across another family with their 2-3 year old sitting in the cart Zane stopped and seemed to be giving her a hard time for riding. Or maybe he was discussing the weather, you just can’t tell!

Since it’s the first of the month let’s do a status report of sorts. He’s a really big climber, his favorites include the two rocking chairs, kitchen chairs, and an end table downstairs. It’s funny that he’s figured out how to rock himself in the chairs but hasn’t yet transferred the technique to his swing. Maybe if we let him swing 24/7 like he wants? Lots of teeth, as mentioned above, with the top canines out much of the way and I think the same for the next teeth behind them. He’s rather protective of his mouth these days. We had a bit of a painful wrestling match over whether I’d get my finger back the last time I tried to poke around. Suffice to say that he chews when he eats now, which really broadens the selection, cuts down on how much prep work we have to do, and reduces our worries by one (well, mostly).

Zane’s sleeping from 8:30pm to 7:30am most days, although he’ll be in bed for another half hour or so reading while his mom gets dressed and caffeinated. Naps are a bit shorter now, only a couple hours usually starting between noon and one. The rest of the time? Zing, Zip, Zowwee!

Still hovering around 23lbs. No new nicks or scrapes to mention, a bit of a rash in the crotch area and his belly button seems to be sticking out more than we remembered but he also has more belly now. There’s quite a bit of hair, considering how light colored it is, but the eyebrows are still MIA.

I bought the family a membership to the local YMCA-type swimming and excercise place. Faith and Zane have made great use of it. There’s a Tot Lot (?) activity Friday morning which mostly consists of a huge gym full of toys and structures to play on. They also have a short-term day-care which costs two bucks an hour, letting the parent go workout while the kid is taken care of. Slacker that I am I’ve only gone once, taking Zane swimming, since then either him or I have been sick. He still doesn’t have much body fat and gets the shivers pretty quickly when swimming.

Sort of funny story. We finished dinner the other night, Faith heading to her office to do some work while I was wrapping up the final steps of cleaning Zane and extracting him from the high chair (which we are thinking of moving away from in favor of a booster chair). Released from the confines Zane bonked into me a couple of times, talked about his fridge magnets, and gradually wandered away. I put away dishes and cleaned up a bit, an ear half-cocked his direction as always. There were the usual squeals and bumps and thumps and babble, but then it got quiet. “Hmm, maybe he’s playing with his mom’s computer or reading a book in his room?”

I waited about ten seconds before setting off to find out. Not in the living room, bathroom closed, not in mom’s room, not in his room. Huh. Not in our bedroom, maybe I missed him in living room…“Faith have you seen the baby?” Joining in on the hunt she immediately noticed that the gate to the top of the stairs was open and went downstairs to check. Yep, Zane had made his way down the stairs, into the family room and was playing with his trains. Coulda swore I’d shut that behind me…

Speaking of fridge magnets: he’s saying more of the alphabet. ‘A’ and ‘O’ are his specialities, but he’s repeated names for the majority of the letters as he moves them from one part of the fridge to another.

I mentioned earlier this week that we got the new iLife from Apple. One of the cool features of the new iPhoto is face detection. It detects parts of a picture that are faces and puts a box around them, asking who it is. After you’ve identified a person a few times it starts identifying them automatically, grouping all of their photos together into mini-albums. You can imagine the wide range of Zane photos it has to deal with. Here’s a funny result, which seemed more like an editorial statement. I inset an example of when it does detect the right person for comparison.

Finally wrap up this long post with a selection of crib shots that have been accumulating on the desktop. The crib, like his high chair, is probably not much longer for this world.